I Don't Want To Talk About Race. I Want to Listen.

If there’s one thing social media has taught me, it’s that talking about race is almost entirely useless. Blood pressures rise, feelings are hurt, sweeping generalizations are made, and in the end nothing is accomplished—the exchange ends not because a consensus has been reached, but because its participants are too exhausted to continue. The declaration that is made each time a new video emerges—that is time for all of us to have “a national conversation about race”—ignores the simple reality that we don’t know how to talk about race.

If I choose to enter into a conversation about race, I do so from the perspective of a blond-haired, blue-eyed, white, straight, middle class, Christian, married, college educated, employed adult—the perspective of someone for whom oppression is purely academic. I can only imagine what it might feel like to be discriminated against by society, because that is not part of my experience. I can learn about it, I can hear others talk about it, but I cannot know it. It’s not part of my sociological DNA, and to claim otherwise is to be blind, arrogant, or both.

So when an unarmed black man dies at the hands of a white police officer—as in the cases of Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Walter Scott and others—my first question about the victim is, “What did he do wrong?” I have been raised to believe that police officers are here to serve and protect the public, that they keep us safe from the bad guys, that if the police are looking for you then you must have done something wrong. So if an unarmed black man is killed at the hands of a white cop under ambiguous circumstances, then he must have been doing something illegal or threatening. Policemen are the good guys, so if an officer is standing over a black body with a smoking gun, then that dead man must have been a bad guy.

Obviously each of these stories is complicated and unique, and obviously my opinion can shift away from that immediate reaction as the details of each incident come out. But make no mistake, that instant, visceral reaction matters. The moment another police video goes viral, my background and the biases that come with it have already determined who gets the benefit of the doubt. I cannot read these stories or see these videos neutrally, just as you cannot. However implicit, each of us understands race based on the way we have experienced its effects in our own lives.

And so we don’t know how to talk about race with one another. We are so tied to our own understandings that are we are unwilling to hear another vantage point for more than a few seconds. The truth is, we don’t want to have a real conversation, a dialogue, about race—we want to explain why we’re right and they’re wrong, and for them to sit down and shut up while we explain it. Talking about race isn’t getting anything done because we have too big an appetite for our own words and no stomach for those of another.

But, as I alluded to in my introductory blog post, sometimes reading and writing can do what talking cannot. This week I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book, “Between the World and Me”, a cross between a memoir and a manifesto on race in America, written as a letter to Coates’ 14-year old son. The book is not an optimistic one; there is no attempt to find redemption in African-Americans’ painful struggle for equality in this country, nor is there much of a nod to progress in that direction. Coates’ outlook is bleak, arguing that the American Dream was built upon the domination of “black bodies” (a term he returns to throughout the book) and that in order for America to change, it must not only acknowledge its past and present sins, but fundamentally reform its Dream.

Coates’ writing is provocative, brilliant, beautiful, and heartbreaking. Certain passages made me angry, others made me sad. Sometimes I nodded along with his points, other times I found myself wanting to argue with him mid-sentence, to accuse him of oversimplifying something so complex. But all I could do was keep reading, keep immersing myself in his perspective, keep learning from the experience of his life and the lessons it has taught him. And in doing so, in letting him tell his full story without interruption, I was able to grasp some things I never heard in the back-and-forth of a Facebook debate, whether because they hadn’t been said or (more likely) because I wasn’t listening.

When I played my music loudly in the car at 16, it meant I was a teenager—when Coates’ son does so, it means he’s a thug with no respect. When I’m asked if I need help in a store, I can say no thank you without eyes following me around the premises—Coates does not share that privilege. When I’m pulled over by a cop, my worst fear is that I’ll be given a speeding ticket—Coates’ worst fear is that the wrong word from him will make his wife a widow and his son an orphan.

Is Coates’ perspective fair to white America, to the establishment, to the police? I don’t know. But I’m not sure it matters. What matters is hearing him before responding, letting him tell his whole story—his fears, his hopes, his ideas—instead of dismissing him out of hand. He has a perspective that is different from mine, probably different from yours, and that perspective deserves a voice at the table, a chance to speak without being shouted down.

Reading “Between the World and Me” stretched me, because it forced me to enter a world I do not know and to inhabit a life that is not my own. It made me do what great writing should—it made me empathize with someone who is not like me. And by listening to his feelings and his arguments, his stories and his conclusions, an unspoken connection formed between writer and reader, black man and white man. I do not know his world as he does…but I know it better than I did before. And in that there is progress.

Perhaps we do not need conversations about race, with their myriad interruptions and misunderstandings. Perhaps we need to do less debating, where the prize is not consensus, but the last word. Maybe the secret is not better explaining your perspective—maybe it is hearing someone else’s.